Archives For corporate governance

I posted this originally on my own blog, but decided to cross-post here since Thom and I have been blogging on this topic.

“The U.S. stock market is having another solid year. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the shares of companies that manage money.”

That’s the lead from Charles Stein on Bloomberg’s Markets’ page today. Stein goes on to offer three possible explanations: 1) a weary bull market, 2) a move toward more active stock-picking by individual investors, and 3) increasing pressure on fees.

So what has any of that to do with the common ownership issue? A few things.

First, it shows that large institutional investors must not be very good at harvesting the benefits of the non-competitive behavior they encourage among the firms the invest in–if you believe they actually do that in the first place. In other words, if you believe common ownership is a problem because CEOs are enriching institutional investors by softening competition, you must admit they’re doing a pretty lousy job of capturing that value.

Second, and more importantly–as well as more relevant–the pressure on fees has led money managers to emphasis low-cost passive index funds. Indeed, among the firms doing well according to the article is BlackRock, “whose iShares exchange-traded fund business tracks indexes, won $20 billion.” In an aggressive move, Fidelity has introduced a total of four zero-fee index funds as a way to draw fee-conscious investors. These index tracking funds are exactly the type of inter-industry diversified funds that negate any incentive for competition softening in any one industry.

Finally, this also illustrates the cost to the investing public of the limits on common ownership proposed by the likes of Einer Elhague, Eric Posner, and Glen Weyl. Were these types of proposals in place, investment managers could not offer diversified index funds that include more than one firm’s stock from any industry with even a moderate level of market concentration. Given competitive forces are pushing investment companies to increase the offerings of such low-cost index funds, any regulatory proposal that precludes those possibilities is sure to harm the investing public.

Just one more piece of real evidence that common ownership is not only not a problem, but that the proposed “fixes” are.

At issue is the growth in the incidence of common-ownership across firms within various industries. In particular, institutional investors with broad portfolios frequently report owning small stakes in a number of firms within a given industry. Although small, these stakes may still represent large block holdings relative to other investors. This intra-industry diversification, critics claim, changes the managerial objectives of corporate executives from aggressively competing to increase their own firm’s profits to tacitly colluding to increase industry-level profits instead. The reason for this change is that competition by one firm comes at a cost of profits from other firms in the industry. If investors own shares across firms, then any competitive gains in one firm’s stock are offset by competitive losses in the stocks of other firms in the investor’s portfolio. If one assumes corporate executives aim to maximize total value for their largest shareholders, then managers would have incentive to soften competition against firms with which they share common ownership. Or so the story goes (more on that in a later post.)

Elhague and Posner, et al., draw their motivation for new antitrust offenses from a handful of papers that purport to establish an empirical link between the degree of common ownership among competing firms and various measures of softened competitive behavior, including airline prices, banking fees, executive compensation, and even corporate disclosure patterns. The paper of most note, by José Azar, Martin Schmalz, and Isabel Tecu and forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, claims to identify a causal link between the degree of common ownership among airlines competing on a given route and the fares charged for flights on that route.

Measuring common ownership with MHHI

Azar, et al.’s airline paper uses a metric of industry concentration called a Modified Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, or MHHI, to measure the degree of industry concentration taking into account the cross-ownership of investors’ stakes in competing firms. The original Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) has long been used as a measure of industry concentration, debuting in the Department of Justice’s Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 1982. The HHI is calculated by squaring the market share of each firm in the industry and summing the resulting numbers.

The MHHI is rather more complicated. MHHI is composed of two parts: the HHI measuring product market concentration and the MHHI_Delta measuring the additional concentration due to common ownership. We offer a step-by-step description of the calculations and their economic rationale in an appendix to our paper. For this post, I’ll try to distill that down. The MHHI_Delta essentially has three components, each of which is measured relative to every possible competitive pairing in the market as follows:

A measure of the degree of common ownership between Company A and Company -A (Not A). This is calculated by multiplying the percentage of Company A shares owned by each Investor I with the percentage of shares Investor I owns in Company -A, then summing those values across all investors in Company A. As this value increases, MHHI_Delta goes up.

A measure of the degree of ownership concentration in Company A, calculated by squaring the percentage of shares owned by each Investor I and summing those numbers across investors. As this value increases, MHHI_Delta goes down.

A measure of the degree of product market power exerted by Company A and Company -A, calculated by multiplying the market shares of the two firms. As this value increases, MHHI_Delta goes up.

This process is repeated and aggregated first for every pairing of Company A and each competing Company -A, then repeated again for every other company in the market relative to its competitors (e.g., Companies B and -B, Companies C and -C, etc.). Mathematically, MHHI_Delta takes the form:

where the Ss represent the firm market shares of, and Betas represent ownership shares of Investor I in, the respective companies A and -A.

As the relative concentration of cross-owning investors to all investors in Company A increases (i.e., the ratio on the right increases), managers are assumed to be more likely to soften competition with that competitor. As those two firms control more of the market, managers’ ability to tacitly collude and increase joint profits is assumed to be higher. Consequently, the empirical research assumes that as MHHI_Delta increases, we should observe less competitive behavior.

And indeed that is the “blockbuster” evidence giving rise to Elhauge’s and Posner, et al.,’s arguments For example, Azar, et. al., calculate HHI and MHHI_Delta for every US airline market–defined either as city-pairs or departure-destination pairs–for each quarter of the 14-year time period in their study. They then regress ticket prices for each route against the HHI and the MHHI_Delta for that route, controlling for a number of other potential factors. They find that airfare prices are 3% to 7% higher due to common ownership. Other papers using the same or similar measures of common ownership concentration have likewise identified positive correlations between MHHI_Delta and their respective measures of anti-competitive behavior.

Problems with the problem and with the measure

We argue that both the theoretical argument underlying the empirical research and the empirical research itself suffer from some serious flaws. On the theoretical side, we have two concerns. First, we argue that there is a tremendous leap of faith (if not logic) in the idea that corporate executives would forgo their own self-interest and the interests of the vast majority of shareholders and soften competition simply because a small number of small stakeholders are intra-industry diversified. Second, we argue that even if managers were so inclined, it clearly is not the case that softening competition would necessarily be desirable for institutional investors that are both intra- and inter-industry diversified, since supra-competitive pricing to increase profits in one industry would decrease profits in related industries that may also be in the investors’ portfolios.

On the empirical side, we have concerns both with the data used to calculate the MHHI_Deltas and with the nature of the MHHI_Delta itself. First, the data on institutional investors’ holdings are taken from Schedule 13 filings, which report aggregate holdings across all the institutional investor’s funds. Using these data masks the actual incentives of the institutional investors with respect to investments in any individual company or industry. Second, the construction of the MHHI_Delta suffers from serious endogeneity concerns, both in investors’ shareholdings and in market shares. Finally, the MHHI_Delta, while seemingly intuitive, is an empirical unknown. While HHI is theoretically bounded in a way that lends to interpretation of its calculated value, the same is not true for MHHI_Delta. This makes any inference or policy based on nominal values of MHHI_Delta completely arbitrary at best.

We’ll expand on each of these concerns in upcoming posts. We will then take on the problems with the policy proposals being offered in response to the common ownership ‘problem.’

One of the hottest antitrust topics of late has been institutional investors’ “common ownership” of minority stakes in competing firms. Writing in the Harvard Law Review, Einer Elhauge proclaimed that “[a]n economic blockbuster has recently been exposed”—namely, “[a] small group of institutions has acquired large shareholdings in horizontal competitors throughout our economy, causing them to compete less vigorously with each other.” In the Antitrust Law Journal, Eric Posner, Fiona Scott Morton, and Glen Weyl contended that “the concentration of markets through large institutional investors is the major new antitrust challenge of our time.” Those same authors took to the pages of the New York Times to argue that “[t]he great, but mostly unknown, antitrust story of our time is the astonishing rise of the institutional investor … and the challenge that it poses to market competition.”

Not surprisingly, these scholars have gone beyond just identifying a potential problem; they have also advocated policy solutions. Elhauge has called for allowing government enforcers and private parties to use Section 7 of the Clayton Act, the provision primarily used to prevent anticompetitive mergers, to police institutional investors’ ownership of minority positions in competing firms. Posner et al., concerned “that private litigation or unguided public litigation could cause problems because of the interactive nature of institutional holdings on competition,” have proposed that federal antitrust enforcers adopt an enforcement policy that would encourage institutional investors either to avoid common ownership of firms in concentrated industries or to limit their influence over such firms by refraining from voting their shares.

The position of these scholars is thus (1) that common ownership by institutional investors significantly diminishes competition in concentrated industries, and (2) that additional antitrust intervention—beyond generally applicable rules on, say, hub-and-spoke conspiracies and anticompetitive information exchanges—is appropriate to prevent competitive harm.

Mike Sykuta and I have recently posted a paper taking issue with this two-pronged view. With respect to the first prong, we contend that there are serious problems with both the theory of competitive harm stemming from institutional investors’ common ownership and the empirical evidence that has been marshalled in support of that theory. With respect to the second, we argue that even if competition were softened by institutional investors’ common ownership of small minority interests in competing firms, the unintended negative consequences of an antitrust fix would outweigh any benefits from such intervention.

In a recent long-form article in the New York Times, reporter Noam Scheiber set out to detail some of the ways Uber (and similar companies, but mainly Uber) are engaged in “an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth.”

That characterization seems innocuous enough, but it is apparent early on that Scheiber’s aim is not only to inform but also, if not primarily, to deride these efforts. The title of the piece, in fact, sets the tone:

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons

Uber and its relationship with its drivers are variously described by Scheiber in the piece as secretive, coercive, manipulative, dominating, and exploitative, among other things. As Schreiber describes his article, it sets out to reveal how

even as Uber talks up its determination to treat drivers more humanely, it is engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate them in the service of its corporate growth — an effort whose dimensions became evident in interviews with several dozen current and former Uber officials, drivers and social scientists, as well as a review of behavioral research.

What’s so galling about the piece is that, if you strip away the biased and frequently misguided framing, it presents a truly engaging picture of some of the ways that Uber sets about solving a massively complex optimization problem, abetted by significant agency costs.

So I did. Strip away the detritus, add essential (but omitted) context, and edit the article to fix the anti-Uber bias, the one-sided presentation, the mischaracterizations, and the fundamentally non-economic presentation of what is, at its core, a fascinating illustration of some basic problems (and solutions) from industrial organization economics. (For what it’s worth, Scheiber should know better. After all, “He holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and undergraduate degrees in math and economics from Tulane University.”)

In my retelling, the title becomes:

How Uber Uses Innovative Management Tactics to Incentivize Its Drivers

My transformed version of the piece, with critical commentary in the form of tracked changes to the original, is here (pdf).

It’s a long (and, as I said, fundamentally interesting) piece, with cool interactive graphics, well worth the read (well, at least in my retelling, IMHO). Below is just a taste of the edits and commentary I added.

For example, where Scheiber writes:

Uber exists in a kind of legal and ethical purgatory, however. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they lack most of the protections associated with employment. By mastering their workers’ mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks on their ability to exploit it.

With my commentary (here integrated into final form rather than tracked), that paragraph becomes:

Uber operates under a different set of legal constraints, however, also duly enacted and under which millions of workers have profitably worked for decades. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they receive their compensation largely in dollars rather than government-mandated “benefits” that remove some of the voluntariness from employer/worker relationships. And, in the case of overtime pay, for example, the Uber business model that is built in part on offering flexible incentives to match supply and demand using prices and compensation, would be next to impossible. It is precisely through appealing to drivers’ self-interest that Uber and the like may be moving the economy forward to a new era when businesses and workers have more flexibility, much to the benefit of all.

Elsewhere, Scheiber’s bias is a bit more subtle, but no less real. Thus, he writes:

As he tried to log off at 7:13 a.m. on New Year’s Day last year, Josh Streeter, then an Uber driver in the Tampa, Fla., area, received a message on the company’s driver app with the headline “Make it to $330.” The text then explained: “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline?” Below were two prompts: “Go offline” and “Keep driving.” The latter was already highlighted.

With my edits and commentary, that paragraph becomes:

As he started the process of logging off at 7:13 a.m. on New Year’s Day last year, Josh Streeter, then an Uber driver in the Tampa, Fla., area, received a message on the company’s driver app with the headline “Make it to $330.” The text then explained: “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline?” Below were two prompts: “Go offline” and “Keep driving.” The latter was already highlighted, but the former was listed first. It’s anyone’s guess whether either characteristic — placement or coloring — had any effect on drivers’ likelihood of clicking one button or the other.

And one last example. Scheiber writes:

Consider an algorithm called forward dispatch — Lyft has a similar one — that dispatches a new ride to a driver before the current one ends. Forward dispatch shortens waiting times for passengers, who may no longer have to wait for a driver 10 minutes away when a second driver is dropping off a passenger two minutes away.

Perhaps no less important, forward dispatch causes drivers to stay on the road substantially longer during busy periods — a key goal for both companies.

Uber and Lyft explain this in essentially the same way. “Drivers keep telling us the worst thing is when they’re idle for a long time,” said Kevin Fan, the director of product at Lyft. “If it’s slow, they’re going to go sign off. We want to make sure they’re constantly busy.”

While this is unquestionably true, there is another way to think of the logic of forward dispatch: It overrides self-control.

* * *

Uber officials say the feature initially produced so many rides at times that drivers began to experience a chronic Netflix ailment — the inability to stop for a bathroom break. Amid the uproar, Uber introduced a pause button.

“Drivers were saying: ‘I can never go offline. I’m on just continuous trips. This is a problem.’ So we redesigned it,” said Maya Choksi, a senior Uber official in charge of building products that help drivers. “In the middle of the trip, you can say, ‘Stop giving me requests.’ So you can have more control over when you want to stop driving.”

It is true that drivers can pause the services’ automatic queuing feature if they need to refill their tanks, or empty them, as the case may be. Yet once they log back in and accept their next ride, the feature kicks in again. To disable it, they would have to pause it every time they picked up a new passenger. By contrast, even Netflix allows users to permanently turn off its automatic queuing feature, known as Post-Play.

This pre-emptive hard-wiring can have a huge influence on behavior, said David Laibson, the chairman of the economics department at Harvard and a leading behavioral economist. Perhaps most notably, as Ms. Rosenblat and Luke Stark observed in an influential paper on these practices, Uber’s app does not let drivers see where a passenger is going before accepting the ride, making it hard to judge how profitable a trip will be.

Here’s how I would recast that, and add some much-needed economics:

Consider an algorithm called forward dispatch — Lyft has a similar one — that dispatches a new ride to a driver before the current one ends. Forward dispatch shortens waiting times for passengers, who may no longer have to wait for a driver 10 minutes away when a second driver is dropping off a passenger two minutes away.

Perhaps no less important, forward dispatch causes drivers to stay on the road substantially longer during busy periods — a key goal for both companies — by giving them more income-earning opportunities.

Uber and Lyft explain this in essentially the same way. “Drivers keep telling us the worst thing is when they’re idle for a long time,” said Kevin Fan, the director of product at Lyft. “If it’s slow, they’re going to go sign off. We want to make sure they’re constantly busy.”

While this is unquestionably true, and seems like another win-win, some critics have tried to paint even this means of satisfying both driver and consumer preferences in a negative light by claiming that the forward dispatch algorithm overrides self-control.

* * *

Uber officials say the feature initially produced so many rides at times that drivers began to experience a chronic Netflix ailment — the inability to stop for a bathroom break. Amid the uproar, Uber introduced a pause button.

“Drivers were saying: ‘I can never go offline. I’m on just continuous trips. This is a problem.’ So we redesigned it,” said Maya Choksi, a senior Uber official in charge of building products that help drivers. “In the middle of the trip, you can say, ‘Stop giving me requests.’ So you can have more control over when you want to stop driving.”

Tweaks like these put paid to the arguments that Uber is simply trying to abuse its drivers. And yet, critics continue to make such claims:

It is true that drivers can pause the services’ automatic queuing feature if they need to refill their tanks, or empty them, as the case may be. Yet once they log back in and accept their next ride, the feature kicks in again. To disable it, they would have to pause it every time they picked up a new passenger. By contrast, even Netflix allows users to permanently turn off its automatic queuing feature, known as Post-Play.

It’s difficult to take seriously claims that Uber “abuses” drivers by setting a default that drivers almost certainly prefer; surely drivers seek out another fare following the last fare more often than they seek out another bathroom break. In any case, the difference between one default and the other is a small change in the number of times drivers might have to push a single button; hardly a huge impediment.

But such claims persist, nevertheless. Setting a trivially different default can have a huge influence on behavior, claims David Laibson, the chairman of the economics department at Harvard and a leading behavioral economist. Perhaps most notably — and to change the subject — as Ms. Rosenblat and Luke Stark observed in an influential paper on these practices, Uber’s app does not let drivers see where a passenger is going before accepting the ride, making it hard to judge how profitable a trip will be. But there are any number of defenses of this practice, from both a driver- and consumer-welfare standpoint. Not least, such disclosure could well create isolated scarcity for a huge range of individual ride requests (as opposed to the general scarcity during a “surge”), leading to longer wait times, the need to adjust prices for consumers on the basis of individual rides, and more intense competition among drivers for the most profitable rides. Given these and other explanations, it is extremely unlikely that the practice is actually aimed at “abusing” drivers.

In recent months Heritage Foundation scholars have discussed concerns stemming from this vaguely-defined NTIA initiative (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here). These concerns include fears that eliminating the U.S. Government’s role in Internet governance could embolden other nations and international organizations (especially the International Telecommunications Union, an arm of the United Nations) to seek to regulate the Internet and limit speech, and create leeway for ICANN to expand beyond its core activities and trench upon Internet freedoms.

Reflecting the “trust but verify” spirit, the just-introduced “Defending Internet Freedom Act of 2014” requires that NTIA maintain its existing Internet oversight functions, unless the NTIA Administrator certifies in writing that certain specified assurances have been met regarding Internet governance. Those assurances include findings that the management of the Internet domain name system will not be exercised by foreign governmental or intergovernmental bodies; that ICANN’s bylaws will be amended to uphold First Amendment-type freedoms of speech, assembly, and association; that a four-fifths supermajority will be required for changes in ICANN’s bylaws or fees for services; that an independent process for resolving disputes between ICANN and third parties be established; and that a host of other requirements aimed at protecting Internet freedoms and ensuring ICANN and IANA accountability be instituted.

Legislative initiatives of this sort, while no panacea, play a valuable role in signaling Congress’s intent to hold the Administration accountable for seeing to it that key Internet freedoms (including the avoidance of onerous regulation and deleterious restrictions on speech and content) are maintained. They merit thoughtful consideration.

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The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) subjects government-imposed burdens on religious exercise to strict scrutiny. In particular, the Act provides that “[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability” unless the government can establish that doing so is the least restrictive means of furthering a “compelling government interest.”

So suppose a for-profit corporation’s stock is owned entirely by evangelical Christians with deeply held religious objections to abortion. May our federal government force the company to provide abortifacients to its employees? That’s the central issue in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which the Supreme Court will soon decide. As is so often the case, resolution of the issue turns on a seemingly mundane matter: Is a for-profit corporation a “person” for purposes of RFRA?

In an amicus brief filed in the case, a group of forty-four corporate and criminal law professors argued that treating corporations as RFRA persons would contradict basic principles of corporate law. Specifically, they asserted that corporations are distinct legal entities from their shareholders, who enjoy limited liability behind a corporate veil and cannot infect the corporation with their own personal religious views. The very nature of a corporation, the scholars argued, precludes shareholders from exercising their religion in corporate form. Thus, for-profit corporations can’t be “persons” for purposes of RFRA.

In what amounts to an epic takedown of the law professor amici, William & Mary law professors Alan Meese and Nathan Oman have published an article explaining why for-profit corporations are, in fact, RFRA persons. Their piece in the Harvard Law Review Forum responds methodically to the key points made by the law professor amici and to a few other arguments against granting corporations free exercise rights.

Among the arguments that Meese and Oman ably rebut are:

Religious freedom applies only to natural persons.

Corporations are simply instrumentalities by which people act in the world, Meese and Oman observe. Indeed, they are nothing more than nexuses of contracts, provided in standard form but highly tailorable by those utilizing them. “When individuals act religiously using corporations they are engaged in religious exercise. When we regulate corporations, we in fact burden the individuals who use the corporate form to pursue their goals.”

Given the essence of a corporation, which separates ownership and control, for-profit corporations can’t exercise religion in accordance with the views of their stockholders.

This claim is simply false. First, it is possible — pretty easy, in fact — to unite ownership and control in a corporation. Business planners regularly do so using shareholder agreements, and many states, including Delaware, explicitly allow for shareholder management of close corporations. Second, scads of for-profit corporations engage in religiously motivated behavior — i.e., religious exercise. Meese and Oman provide a nice litany of examples (with citations omitted here):

A kosher supermarket owned by Orthodox Jews challenged Massachusetts’ Sunday closing laws in 1960. For seventy years, the Ukrops Supermarket chain in Virginia closed on Sundays, declined to sell alcohol, and encouraged employees to worship weekly. A small grocery store in Minneapolis with a Muslim owner prepares halal meat and avoids taking loans that require payment of interest prohibited by Islamic law. Chick-fil-A, whose mission statement promises to “glorify God,” is closed on Sundays. A deli that complied with the kosher standards of its Conservative Jewish owners challenged the Orthodox definition of kosher found in New York’s kosher food law, echoing a previous challenge by a different corporation of a similar New Jersey law. Tyson Foods employs more than 120 chaplains as part of its effort to maintain a “faith-friendly” culture. New York City is home to many Kosher supermarkets that close two hours before sundown on Friday and do not reopen until Sunday. A fast-food chain prints citations of biblical verses on its packaging and cups. A Jewish entrepreneur in Brooklyn runs a gas station and coffee shop that serves only Kosher food. Hobby Lobby closes on Sundays and plays Christian music in its stores. The company provides employees with free access to chaplains, spiritual counseling, and religiously themed financial advice. Moreover, the company does not sell shot glasses, refuses to allow its trucks to “backhaul” beer, and lost $3.3 million after declining to lease an empty building to a liquor store.

As these examples illustrate, the assertion by lower courts that “for-profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise” is just empirically false.

Allowing for-profit corporations to have religious beliefs would create intracorporate conflicts that would reduce the social value of the corporate form of business.

The corporate and criminal law professor amici described a parade of horribles that would occur if corporations were deemed RFRA persons. They insisted, for example, that RFRA protection would inject religion into a corporation in a way that “could make the raising of capital more challenging, recruitment of employees more difficult, and entrepreneurial energy less likely to flourish.” In addition, they said, RFRA protection “would invite contentious shareholder meetings, disruptive proxy contests, and expensive litigation regarding whether the corporations should adopt a religion and, if so, which one.”

But actual experience suggests there’s no reason to worry about such speculative harms. As Meese and Oman observe, we’ve had lots of experience with this sort of thing: Federal and state laws already allow for-profit corporations to decline to perform or pay for certain medical procedures if they have religious or moral objections. From the Supreme Court’s 1963 Sherbert decision to its 1990 Smith decision, strict scrutiny applied to governmental infringements on corporations’ religious exercise. A number of states have enacted their own versions of RFRA, most of which apply to corporations. Thus, “[f]or over half a century, … there has been no per se bar to free exercise claims by for-profit corporations, and the parade of horribles envisioned by the [law professor amici] has simply not materialized.” Indeed, “the scholars do not cite a single example of a corporate governance dispute connected to [corporate] decisions [related to religious exercise].”

Permitting for-profit corporations to claim protection under RFRA will lead to all sorts of false claims of religious belief in an attempt to evade government regulation.

The law professor amici suggest that affording RFRA protection to for-profit corporations may allow such companies to evade regulatory requirements by manufacturing a religious identity. They argue that “[c]ompanies suffering a competitive disadvantage [because of a government regulation] will simply claim a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion. A company will adopt a board resolution asserting a religious belief inconsistent with whatever regulation they find obnoxious . . . .”

As Meese and Oman explain, however, this problem is not unique to for-profit corporations. Natural persons may also assert insincere religious claims, and courts may need to assess sincerity to determine if free exercise rights are being violated. The law professor amici contend that it would be unprecedented for courts to assess whether religious beliefs are asserted in “good faith.” But the Supreme Court decision the amici cite in support of that proposition, Meese and Oman note, held only that courts lack competence to evaluate the truth of theological assertions or the accuracy of a particular litigant’s interpretation of his faith. “This task is entirely separate … from the question of whether a litigant’s asserted religious beliefs are sincerely held. Courts applying RFRA have not infrequently evaluated such sincerity.”

***

In addition to rebutting the foregoing arguments (and several others) against treating for-profit corporations as RFRA persons, Meese and Oman set forth a convincing affirmative argument based on the plain text of the statute and the Dictionary Act. I’ll let you read that one on your own.

I’ll also point interested readers to Steve Bainbridge’s fantastic work on this issue. Here is his critique of the corporate and criminal law professors’ amicus brief. Here is his proposal for using the corporate law doctrine of reverse veil piercing to assess a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs.

This paper shows close connections between CEOs’ vacation schedules and corporate news disclosures. Identify vacations by merging corporate jet flight histories with real estate records of CEOs’ property owned near leisure destinations. Companies disclose favorable news just before CEOs leave for vacation and delay subsequent announcements until CEOs return, releasing news at an unusually high rate on the CEO’s first day back. When CEOs are away, companies announce less news than usual and stock prices exhibit sharply lower volatility. Volatility increases immediately when CEOs return to work. CEOs spend fewer days out of the office when their ownership is high and when the weather at their vacation homes is cold or rainy.

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“Say on pay” seems like one of those “chicken soup” ideas — at best salutary and at worst unobjectionable. Who could object to letting the shareholders vote on executive pay?

Minor Myers, for one, in The Perils of Shareholder Voting on Executive Compensation. He suggests that “the more involved shareholders are in a firm’s managerial decisions, the more difficult it is for directors to be held accountable for the outcome of those decisions.” The shareholder vote, he argues, will insulate directors’ compensation decisions from shareholder outrage, which might otherwise have served as an important discipline. He “proposes amending the [say on pay] legislation to allow firms to opt-out of the say on pay regime by shareholder vote. This preserves the benefits of say on pay for those firms where shareholders wish to retain it and allows other firms to exit the regime at little cost.”

This proposal makes some sense. Myers cites evidence indicating that some firms gain and others lose from say on pay. In other words, some firms find that they benefit more from holding directors solely responsible for managerial pay than by having the (mostly disengaged) shareholders take responsibility. Indeed, Myers’ theory suggests say on pay may be a boon to greedy managers.

Although Myers would amend say on pay to make it optional, one wonders why the rule would be necessary at all. State corporation law already provides for something like an opt-in regime by authorizing charter amendments on this issue. Myers argues that opt-out is better than opt-in because the equilibrium under the opt-in alternative would be driven by managerial opportunism. But given shareholder inertia, I’m not persuaded the equilibrium under opt out would be any better.

In any event, the rationale for federal interference in state corporate law is the need for federal minimum standards. If say on pay is no longer a minimum standard — if, like other corporate governance provisions it is just another default rule, with costs and benefits that vary from firm to firm — then why should it be a federal rule?

Myers’ analysis suggests that say on pay is, at best, one possible decent default rule, suitable for some firms. If that’s the best rationale we can come up with, then it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t have federal say on all other corporate governance — in other words, a full-fledged optional federal corporate law. Such a law could include a say on pay opt-in. Or we could have an opt-in federal corporate law with opt out say on pay. We could call such a statute say on say on say on pay.

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Alison Frankel gripes about a NJ judge’s ruling throwing out a shareholders’ derivative suit seeking to hold the J & J board accountable for problems concerning the company’s Rispardal drug. Frankel thinks the bad faith standard the court applied is not high enough.

Ted Frank responds that the fact that the company had settled criminal allegations doesn’t mean the board was irresponsible given big companies’ exposure to prosecutorial overreaching (here’s my thoughts on the problems with prosecutors). He notes that given huge potential penalties and legal costs “even a risk-neutral set of executives would refuse to go to trial on criminal charges that they had a 95% chance of winning.” As Ted says:

The issue is this: first, any corporate law is going to have to balance false negatives (valid suits against directors being thrown out prematurely) and false positives (invalid suits against directors costing tens of millions of dollars in time and money to resolve). Any opening up of the courtroom doors to challenge directors will reduce false negatives at the expense of more false positives; any increase in the burden to bring suit will reduce false positives at the expense of more false negatives.

Anyway, Ted continues, shareholders of NJ corporations can decide to invest in firms incorporated elsewhere if they think NJ law is too lenient on directors, aptly citing my and O’Hara’s The Law Market.

Of course Frankel might argue that the business judgment rule that the court used to decide the case is ubiquitous, leaving plaintiffs with little choice. Indeed, the only significant dissent is Nevada which is, if anything, even easier on directors than NJ. Frankel might also argue that this indicates state corporation law is rigged for managers and that we would do better under federal law. Perhaps what we need is a super Dodd-Frank/SOX on steroids that preempts state law and exposes managers to suits like the one NJ dismissed.

I would respond that the universal acceptance of the business judgment rule represents the market’s rejection of Frankel’s position. If Frankel wants to complain that the market for corporate law is imperfect, she would need to persuade me that shareholders are better off in the clutches of Congress.

Like this:

Yaniv Grinstein and and Stefano Rossi have an interesting paper, Good Monitoring, Bad Monitoring, on the effect of corporate law, and specifically of the famous Delaware case Smith v. Van Gorkom and the Delaware legislature’s subsequent “fix” of that result. Here’s the abstract:

We estimate the value of monitoring in publicly traded corporations by exploiting a natural experiment. A Delaware Supreme Court decision unexpectedly held directors liable for monetary damages for breach of fiduciary duties. The ruling signaled a sharp and exogenous increase in Delaware Courts’ scrutiny over board decisions. We analyze the impact of the ruling on stock returns using matching and differences-in-differences techniques. We find that, compared with appropriately matched non-Delaware firms, Delaware-incorporated firms in high-growth industries lost (CARs of -2.10%) and firms in low-growth industries gained (CARs of 1.40%) in the [0,10] window around the announcement of the Supreme Court decision. A later regulatory reform to the Delaware Code that reversed the effects of the Supreme Court decision had opposite results: firms in high-growth industries gained and firms in low-growth industries lost significantly. Our results shed light on the complex interplay of courts and regulation and on its implications for shareholder value.

In the conclusion the authors state: “We interpret these results as implying that “one-size-fits-all” models represent inadequate solutions to the corporate governance problem.” In other words, a strict duty of care is good for some companies but not others.

This suggests that firms should be allowed to contract to tailor regulation to their needs. But the Delaware code revision did just that — allow firms to contract. Yet returns for low-growth firms dropped, despite the fact that the statute allowed these firms to remain subject to the strict care standard.